by Schow, Ryan
“Show me,” he says.
“No.”
“No scars, right?”
I don’t say anything. That’s when he grabs me, throws me down and starts to choke me. My eyes bulge and my fear-centers go nuclear. I can’t breathe. The pressure in my head feels explosive. When I start losing consciousness, he lets go.
“Stand up,” he says, like he’s irritated with me. “Put your hands up.”
I do.
“Start moving.”
I start.
“So you got caught off guard, choked, burned.”
“Yes.”
“Three different attacks.”
“Yes.”
We’re moving now. I’m swinging at his head but he’s telling me to go for the body. He’s telling me headshots are fancy, but groin shots and body shots end fights faster. He says to breathe outside of fighting distance, to stay loose.
I try.
He slows his attacks, lets me move. “Why do you heal so fast?” he says.
“Told you,” I lie. “Always been like that.”
He flicks a kick off my forehead hitting me so hard, I see only blackness. When I wake up, he is standing over me, examining my head. There is blood all over the mat, but he isn’t looking sorry.
“The cut I just gave you, it’s healing at an impossible rate. I’ve been watching the skin stitch itself together.”
I know he isn’t bluffing because my body is burning inside. Healing itself. Plus, I’m starting to sweat like a pig in a steamer, which is more sweat than I should have during sparring.
“That’s just the way I am.”
“Bullshit,” he says. “Get up.”
I roll over, pick myself up.
“Move.”
I move.
One minute later, I’m on the ground and he’s choking me out. This time, when the pressure gets too high and I start tapping his arm, he doesn’t let go. I black out again.
When I wake up, he says, “You didn’t die.”
“I didn’t.”
“Now that you know you won’t die, give up the fear,” he says. Then: “Get up. Move.”
I get up.
I move.
In the span of ten minutes, I get choked out seven more times. He doesn’t let up, not until I’m out cold. I’m thinking, this can’t be good for my brain. Then again, I’m super human, so is it really all that bad?
“Are you scared?” he says.
“Of getting choked out?” He nods. We’re both moving now. “Not anymore.”
“The mystery is gone, right?”
“It is,” I say.
“Good. How do you feel?”
“Pissed off.”
“You want to learn how to break the choke hold so I can’t knock you out anymore?”
“Yes.”
So for the next hour, he teaches me one self-defense against the chokehold and I only get choked out fourteen of the seventeen attempts. Sensei Naygel says the holds I escaped, it wasn’t him letting me win. The way he says it makes me feel good inside. Like there’s hope.
By the end of Saturday, my gi is washed through with blood and I feel freaking exhausted. A zombie in red and white pajamas. Sensei bows, and I bow, and then he says, “You have put in twenty-five hours of study, learned a self-defense which you can demonstrate under duress, and you have six hours of sparring complete. Congratulations, Ms. Swann, today you have risen to the rank of yellow belt.”
With that, he pulls a folded yellow belt from inside his gi, then tells me how to complete the ceremony associated with the change in rank. I follow his instructions to the word. Proudly, I put on my new belt then tell myself there’s no way I’m quitting.
“Shall I expect you here next week?”
“You shall,” I say.
A Bleeding, Wasted Thing
1
After Olga’s father was killed by Arabelle’s mother, the five or six or seven year old mute and her grieving mother abandoned their dilapidated home and headed to God knows where. Away was all that mattered.
Arabelle’s mother, she went to pieces.
One morning Arabelle stood in the doorway to her parent’s room and watched her mother cry. The woman looked up from where she was curled into the blankets and said, “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I have an illness of the heart.”
She told Arabelle it couldn’t be cured.
This particular illness made her mother sob for entire days straight. Then it turned her into a mute. It stole the soft look of her face and body and made her gaunt, so skinny Arabelle wondered if the illness was terminal. She looked starved. Near dead. The way she just fell into bed or on the couch, the way she had that coma-victim look about her, this illness was the thief that left Arabelle without a functioning parent.
It finally set in that her father was gone forever, and after only a solid week, Arabelle contracted the same illness of the heart. She missed her father so much.
She loved him.
So much that her own light dimmed, and she, too, felt her body dying under the weight of a tremendous grief.
Arabelle’s mother stopped going to work. She stayed in bed all day. Arabelle found herself curled up beside the woman, hoping to be swallowed into the same ocean of despair, if only to have company. If only to not suffer and die alone.
The plants in the garden died. Fruits and vegetables withered. In the garden, where everything had died, remained her father. A shriveling, rotting lump. From the porch, she could see the flies like a moving black cloud around him. At night, under the cover of darkness, small animals ate him. Arabelle heard them.
She cried.
She was just twelve and in her broken, mortal mind, she asked God to send the creatures to take her father away so she didn’t have to see him like that.
Finally, in the second week, her uncle Vladimir—a short, boisterous man with muscles and good looks and a quick mouth—came knocking on the front door spouting nonsensically about taking charge of things.
People said he was pushy. They were right.
He walked into the house, peeled her fragile body from her mother’s side and made her shower. He stripped her himself because she didn’t have the energy. When she was bathed, showered and re-dressed in the same filthy clothes (because her parents couldn’t afford but the one outfit for her), her uncle said, “Until your mother recovers, I am in charge of this house and you will do as I say. Got it?”
She was scared. A child. Vladimir was a grown adult with slick, black hair and a pointed goatee and expensive clothes. She couldn’t stop staring at his fancy new watch. She wanted to give her soul to the time piece, lock herself inside its shiny mechanisms, so she might go someplace happy.
Someplace safe.
She tried to understand the thought, but even to her it made no sense. It only felt right in the way things sometimes feel right when you know nothing in your life will ever be normal again.
He said, “The first thing you need is to start doing your part.” When Arabelle said she didn’t understand, he said, “You need to contribute. This life of yours isn’t going to pay for itself. And I’m sure as hell not going to pay for it.”
The following day, he arrived with two sets of nice clothes and a tube of bright red lipstick. He told her to put on the clothes. To put on the bright red lipstick. Having worn the same shirt and pants for months, she was happy for the new dress. The lipstick, however, didn’t feel right on her small lips.
“Have you been to Odessa at night?” he asked as she nervously modeled the clothing for him. She nodded her head. She couldn’t recall ever having gone anywhere significant. He said, “It’s still in Ukraine. Just outside the Port of Odessa. There are lots of pretty girls like you there, you will like it, I promise. And they all wear nice clothes and lipstick. You’ll see.”
“I don’t want to go to Odessa,” she said. It was too soon to leave the house, she thought. Too soon to leave her dead father. And her dying mother. Besides, she was scared of life in the
Ukraine. Terrified of the world outside her small village.
More than that, though, she was dying to wipe off her uncle’s lipstick. It felt goopy on her thinnish lips and she ate some of it each time she spoke.
“You don’t have a choice,” he said, his forgiving eyes turning cold. The way his body could warm a room and then ice it over never failed to startle her.
From his bag, he withdrew cheese and crackers and a knife and said, “We need to put some meat on those brittle bones of yours.”
2
On Arabelle’s first night at the very busy Port of Odessa, Vladimir sent her into the square with the other girls and said, “Try to get the attention of those men. They will pay you money.”
“Why will they pay me money?” Arabelle asked.
She was shivering, but not from the cold. Her skin was pulled tight and pebbled with gooseflesh. She felt underdressed. Too old looking for her age with her lipstick, the eye color her uncle made her wear, and the tall shoes that were already poking and cramping her feet.
“Because the men down here like girls like you,” he says. “And they will happily pay to be your friend. In case you’re worried, I’ll be watching, just to make sure you are okay.”
After an hour of parading around the cobbled sidewalk stones of Tamozhennaya Square not knowing if what she was doing was wrong or right, a pale, shifty man with a weed patch of a beard and clothes too big for his menial body, approached her. All the girls whose hard eyes were on her—the same girls who hung together in packs, looking at her like they hated her, even though they didn’t know her—they mollified at the sight of this man. He was not attractive. He was not young. Yet they pined for his attention. This bone rail of a man, he simply ignored the other girls. The minute these smiling, fake girls realized the man was heading right for Arabelle, their kind, inviting faces blistered with what Arabelle could only assume was hatred directed at her.
The older man took her young hand into his bony, calloused mitt and said, “Will you walk with me?”
The air smelled of sea water and oil, but the man’s layered smells changed everything. He had an awful odor about him, which was almost masked by the strength of cheap cologne and the stale reek of alcoholism. Wiggling worms filled her stomach. Her insides cramped with fear as she swallowed against the upsurge of her stomach. Her eyes looked everywhere for her uncle; when she saw him, she blinked fast, as if crying out for help. Instead of rescuing her, he simply nodded and gave a small wave with his fingers as if to say go, it’s alright.
“You will pay me money?” she asked. Her voice broke, betraying her.
The man smiled. He was missing a tooth in front, and another off to the side was broken and turning black. “Of course, I will.” His breath was like death. Like dying.
Her uncle stood by the Port of Odessa sign, smoking, watching her from a distance. There were dozens of girls parading through the square on tall heels with short dresses and too much makeup. A lot of these girls were talking to men three times their age or more. This man of hers, this tired old goat, he guided her to a nearby street away from the lights of the Port. Away from the crowd of girls and traffic and witnesses.
Her brain told her to run. Her stomach was wanting to empty out what little contents it held. Together she and the man walked up the large, wide stone stairs next to an elevating street that seemed to hang in perpetual shadow.
Is this normal? she thought. Her mind tried to rationalize that it was, so she didn’t run away just yet. She thought, if people see us, they will think he is my grandfather. She wondered if he was a nice man, or if he was bad.
She swallowed hard, blinked back the tears. Her legs kept moving. Her heart kicked wild in her chest, throbbing so fiercely her armpits dampened with a rancorous smelling sheen of sweat.
She looked over her shoulder and down the street. Her uncle was on the move, albeit following from a fair distance. He shooed her on with his hand. She turned her attention back to the man. The bristle on his face was black and gray, and his skin had that mottled look made worse by age and pocked scars. In the street lamps, as they strolled under one for the briefest of moments, Arabelle saw his ugly eyes, his small mouth and his blackened tooth, hidden mostly by a half grin. A knowing grin. Worse, he had her hand in a grip tight enough to keep her from wiggling free.
He said, “Step in the brush, young lady, so we might have some privacy.”
“For what?” she asked. Deep down, she knew why they were here. Her mind was conflicted though. Her uncle, he wouldn’t let this happen, would he?
“I want us to get to know each other,” he said, “so we may become friends.”
“I want my uncle.”
“My uncle was a brutal rapist,” he said. “I, however, am a gentleman.”
She half followed, was half pulled into the brush. Her head swiveled. She locked eyes with her uncle. He had moved up the street and was on the sidewalk across the main road. In the shadows. He lit another cigarette, his face looking unworried, anticipatory.
Maybe it will be okay, she told herself. Then: no it won’t.
With a cigarette in hand, her uncle waved her on, like she should do whatever the man told her. Suddenly her uncle was not her safe harbor. He was not her protector.
“Sit down,” the man said.
“My dress.”
“You’ll be fine. We’ll brush you off after we’ve gotten to know each other.” In the wide thicket of trees and low brush, kept secret by the night’s veil of darkness, the ugly man pressed his lips to hers. His breath was smoked cigarettes and bitter coffee. The smell was like he’d been eating dog droppings.
Arabelle resisted, precipitating what would become a losing battle. The lecherous creature had talons for hands. They pawed at her everywhere.
She cried out her uncle’s name as her clothes were being yanked and torn and pulled off. As the man’s atrocious breath sat like toxic waste in the air, poisonous and rotten, she cried out for Vladimir over and over again. Finally the skeleton of an assailant smacked her on her cheek hard enough to stop her screaming.
Shock set in and her body just sort of rocked back and forth. Blood trickled in a line from her left nostril, but she hardly noticed, and she dared not wipe it away.
Through the brush and across the street, she caught glimpses of her uncle, smoking, checking both up the street and down.
The pervert laid her down, pinned her shoulders to the dirt. Hard soil and pebbles cut into her exposed shoulders, pricked her back and spine. He shimmied the dress off, yanked off her underwear. Then he dropped his own trousers.
Her eyes fell upon the horror that was this man’s stiff, hairy privates, and she realized there were worse things than death.
Straining to move backwards, scraping her head on packed earth to free herself from the beast’s advances, she pushed away from him with the heels of her hands and bare feet.
Her uncle lit another cigarette, checked his watch. Not seeming too worried.
The pervert’s body crawled on top of hers. She drew the deepest breath she could manage, but before the scream inside could tear itself loose, a filthy, calloused hand cupped her mouth shut. The scream died inside her. She couldn’t breathe.
The next few moments passed in a suffocating blur as she rocked in and out of consciousness. When he was done, the geezer stood, pulled up his pants, then fished out a wad of bills and dropped them on her breastless chest. As she lie there in the dirt, ruined, crying, violated, he pushed his way through the brush and headed back to where he came from.
She hauled herself to her knees, turned to watch him go, to make sure he was leaving, and that’s when her uncle flicked the cigarette into the gutter and approached the man.
Her uncle stopped him in the street, grabbed his shirt and shook him, and then he extended a hand. He wanted the rest of the man’s money. When the geezer turned out his pockets, her uncle punched him in the stomach, then grabbed him by his hair and dragged him into the nearby bushes. Th
ere was a scuffle. Then the sounds of a struggle followed by the hard packing sounds of a man taking a beating. She heard the man’s pain being returned to him one brutal shot at a time, and she ate it up. His pain could not undo the violation she just survived, and it could not save her, but it did nourish her battered soul the tiniest little bit.
To the soundtrack of this man’s demise, she pulled up her underwear, put on her dirty, torn dress. She did not fix her hair. It didn’t matter. The pain between her legs made standing straight and walking right feel impossible. Not that it mattered. If her life depended on it, she couldn’t make her mind think a single intelligible thought.
About the time Arabelle staggered out of the bushes, her uncle was done beating the man. She never knew if he was dead or alive when they left. She never asked. Deep down, she prayed he was dead.
Her uncle took the money clutched tight in her hand. She just stood there, lifeless. A zombie. A bleeding, wasted thing. Her body was dirty and scraped, and her vagina ached so bad her knees buckled within the first few steps. Her uncle caught her, then he carried her the rest of the way to the car.
In the car, heading home, in the smallest, most wounded tone, she said, “Why did you let that man do that to me?” Her mouth, it just made the words. Faint and unrushed. So much pain in the question.
From his pants pocket, her uncle pulled out and showed her the money. “This money is how you do your part. And what you did tonight got you that money. But don’t worry, child, it won’t always be this bad.”
The Witch’s Clit
1
The red headed woman was Satan. She was Jesus. Her name was Rebecca, but she preferred to go by Becky. No last name. And Brayden didn’t ask. He didn’t care, really. To her credit, she never pressured Brayden for sex, and they drank a lot, but Brayden’s will to not become a man-whore was fast deteriorating. He had to hold out. He needed to hold out. Why? Because the pale tan line on her finger left by a recently disappeared wedding ring spooked him. To think he was going to have sex with, not one, but two married women in a week…he wasn’t sure how he should feel about that.
